Business outcome mindset

A large area of concern for many Gartner clients is “How do I get a large organization to do new things, to collaborate effectively, and to improve overall delivery effectiveness?” This area is a huge focus for our Professional Effectiveness research – it not only applies to architects, but also to our entire constituency of […]

A large area of concern for many Gartner clients is “How do I get a large organization to do new things, to collaborate effectively, and to improve overall delivery effectiveness?” This area is a huge focus for our Professional Effectiveness research – it not only applies to architects, but also to our entire constituency of […]

My friend and colleague Jack Santos sent me a link to the NYTimes story “Looking for a lesson in Google’s Perks” by James B. Stewart. Jack knows I am interested in work from home and anything else for that matter related to employee engagement. The article states that “Google doesn’t require employees to work from […]

My friend and colleague Jack Santos sent me a link to the NYTimes story “Looking for a lesson in Google’s Perks” by James B. Stewart. Jack knows I am interested in work from home and anything else for that matter related to employee engagement. The article states that “Google doesn’t require employees to work from […]

The Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) research team is fond of gearheads. You know, the technical professionals who get things done within organizations, the ones who find the answers. For the past 5 years the Professional Effectiveness team has been doing gearheads workshops at our Catalyst conference to help technical professionals in different aspects of […]

The Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) research team is fond of gearheads. You know, the technical professionals who get things done within organizations, the ones who find the answers. For the past 5 years the Professional Effectiveness team has been doing gearheads workshops at our Catalyst conference to help technical professionals in different aspects of […]

According to Wikipedia, inversion of control (IoC) is an object-oriented programming practice whereby the object coupling is bound at run time by an “assembler” object and are typically not knowable at compile time using static analysis. The binding process is achieved through dependency injection. In practice, Inversion of Control is a style of software construction […]

Recently, @davegray @tetradian @nickmalik and I (@mikerollings) had a brief twitter exchange about the role of luck in strategy. What is luck anyway? Isn’t it just a happy accident, an unexpected happening, a simple explanation for the unexpected, a serendipitous association that leaves us in awe of the randomness of life? In that context, strategy […]

All organizations at some time in their history have experimented, gained knowledge, and operationalized it – experimentation is synonymous with entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurs test many theories as they launch an idea. They are not afraid of making errors and learning from their mistakes. As they refine ideas and gain more knowledge through experimentation, they eventually reach […]

Last week’s post “Replacing Taylorism as our Management Doctrine” called for the end of Taylorism. Thankfully, I am not the first to call for the end of Taylorism or to write about human characteristics which businesses frequently ignore. There are many before me who have added significant insights into this debilitating management doctrine and all […]

Over the last 239 years, organizations have been applying hierarchy, and top-down command-oriented management. This mindset erupted with the dawn of the steam engine in 1771, and in the late 1800s it was honed to razor sharpness by Frederick Winslow Taylor – the father of efficiency thinking and the science of productivity. Taylor’s work is […]

National Public Radio (NPR) seems to wake my imagination. This morning they had a story about IBM’s Watson. Watson is IBM’s computer that is squaring off against two Jeopardy champions – the shows air for the next 3 days. I wonder how many people will begin to believe that Watson actually thinks? I’m sure it […]